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Chocolate Cupcakes with Peppermint Buttercream

These may be one of my favorite things I’ve made in a long time. Usually I get bored of stuff after a little while and end up tossing some or not wanting to eat it after it’s been in the kitchen for a few days. I couldn’t stop eating these ones!

Chocolate cake from Hershey’s, buttercream was a pretty standard recipe that I used peppermint extract instead of vanilla extract in (and determined the amount by checking several peppermint buttercream recipes and averaging what I thought was a good amount).

Ingredients

1 cup boiling water (I didn’t boil it, just got it at highest possible temp out of our faucet).

2 eggs

1 cup milk

1-1/2 teaspoons baking soda

1 teaspoon salt

1-3/4 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 cup HERSHEY’S Cocoa

1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder

2 cups sugar

Directions

1 Heat oven to 350°F. Grease and flour two 9-inch round baking pans (I did cupcakes instead – just put the cups directly into the baking cups on the muffin pan).These were my “helpers”. The smaller one cried and yelled mommy and threw spoons around the kitchen through half of the process.

2 Stir together sugar, flour, cocoa, baking powder, baking soda and salt in large bowl. Add eggs, milk, oil and vanilla; beat on medium speed of mixer 2 minutes. Stir in boiling water (batter will be thin). Pour batter into prepared pans. It was REALLY thin (like liquid) but actually made it easier to pour into the cupcake cups because I transferred it to measuring cup and then poured out of that into the cups. Only a little bit of mess on the first one! I always have trouble overfilling and did my best so far with only slight overlap of the cupcake cups vs. my usual.

And now the frosting – again, no link back because I just used a generic recipe that was the same on many blogs…I halved the recipes that I found b/c I didn’t want a ton of cupcakes (I only made the one pan of 12). Info below is already halved.

Slowly add sugar and beat in with butter (it was very powdery and crumbly but I think that’s ok).

Add milk as desired to get the thickness you want. [NOTE – I USED TOO MUCH SO MY FROSTING WAS A LITTLE DROOPY, I’D USE THE LOWER END OF THE RANGE NEXT TIME]

Add extract and mix well.

I put the frosting in a frosting bag and used a decorative tip, both from a super cute cupcake baking kit my brother and sister in law got me for my birthday. I think they turned out surprisingly pretty!